Mac Nagaswami, a spirited University of Delaware student, has managed to build an advertising business on a modest budget – even before walking with the graduating class of 2014 in May.

He'll tell you it all comes down to one age-old adage: "Listen to your gut."

"I always knew I would not take a normal route in life from college and get a 9 to 5 job," Nagaswami said. "I always knew it – in my gut – that it just wouldn't work for me."

What does work for Nagaswami, who started up Penguin Ads in the university's Venture Development Center on South College Avenue in Newark, is the challenge of finding clients and new ways to incorporate social media into the business he has shared with Greg Star, a UD graduate, since 2012.

The mission is simple: Connect businesses that want to advertise with drivers who are willing to have their car wrapped with an advertisement.

About a month and a half ago, Nagaswami and Star secured a contract with ShopRite in Glasgow. The supermarket is owned by the Kenny family and part of Delaware Supermarkets Inc., which operates six ShopRites in the state and a brand that is ranked No. 4 in the country behind Acme, Pathmark/Superfresh and Walgreens.

For the Glasgow location, Penguin Ads wrapped 15 vehicles in a company logo for a three-month campaign that seems to be creating buzz.

Penguin Ads pays drivers about $100 per month to drive with a company advertisement wrapped around their vehicle. That allows the startup to geo-target specific ZIP codes and saturate the area with drivers from the community branding an advertiser's message.

"We're tying a brand name to a member of the community," Nagaswami said. "There's no better way to do that than to attach the brand to a consumer who loves the product or company already and is willing to put an advertisement on their car."

Drivers are interviewed, motor vehicle records and attitudes are checked, and then checked again, before they are allowed to represent a Penguin Ads client.

"If you're traveling behind a car for 20 minutes, that message is in front of you for 20 minutes," Nagaswami said. "The fact that it's novel – a fleet of vehicles dominating an area in a way that's impossible to ignore but not invasive – makes it different."

ShopRite's campaign is a picture game with an incentive to win an iPad. The ad prompts onlookers to snap a photograph of the logo on a participating car and post it on their personal Facebook page using the hashtag #ShopRitecar.

"We're linking social media exposure with the campaign, and people are engaging, taking pictures and talking about it, not so much to win an iPad but because it's not something they see every day," Nagaswami said.

But that's not the case for all passersby. Some would like to win an iPad.

One driver recently was stopped by a police officer on the first day of operating an ad-wrapped vehicle. "The cop pulled him over so he could take a picture of the logo and enter to win an iPad," Nagaswami said.

ShopRite and Penguin Ads clients are provided mapping reports that indicate how many miles were driven within each targeted ZIP code, when and where.

There's more to come.

"We found a traffic engineering company out of Toronto that created software which takes GPS output information in a certain format and it becomes input data, chugs it through an algorithm and spits out how many people saw that advertisement within a day," Nagaswami said. "It gives the total number of people who saw the message based on the route they drove."

The software is being tested in a Penguin Ads car being used in a campaign for the University of Delaware's MBA program. The young entrepreneurs expect to use the technology for future clients.

"We're on the right track but still fleshing out pricing," Nagaswami said. "We're more concerned right now with working with credible, large clients to gain credibility ourselves, and then start charging what we deserve."

Perseverance has brought the company to profitability, and Nagaswami, who is wrapping up his final college courses this month, to a full-time job ahead of graduation.